Tuesday, April 7, 2009

This is something I wanted to write long time back, but something or the other happened in the middle. Now finally, the time has come. Let me put my thoughts on it.

If you are a serious Tweeter, you will need a good follower base. If you are a marketer, you need more people to follow you. Quality is important but not as much as quantity.

When I say "Quantity", this does not include Bots and Spamers. I mean real people. But yes, all sorts of people irrespective of their Twitter or Web usage behavior.

Here are few reasons why!

1. Everyone is your potential customer; you need to convert

If you have been a marketer for long, you must have known that everyone is your potential target customer. Some people are direct targets while many more are indirects. Word of mouth simply cannot be ignored, especially if you are a Social Marketer.

2. No one is a sure customer; Conversion Rate is low

This is another big truth. If you know someone personally and he is following you, he isn't your gain from Twitter. The gain is to get new followers, and build good relations. End goal would be to convert them into your business partner.

In the unknown world, however fit or good you may assume, one can never be your sure customer. Conversion rate is very low. The average of the market is said to be around 2%.

3. Measuring Quality is Difficult

It is hard to rank customers even when they are with the business for a long time. The complexity comes when there are diverse portfolios and diverse metrices. Low Risk, high profitability, high loyalty, high life time value, high RFM etc give weightage to different set of people. Further, when it comes to the perspective customers, its all the way more difficult. There can be some predictive methods to target, but their application is best applied to the interested class than to the entire market. Out of huge numbers, if few get interested, targeting can be done to serve those.

Targeting is important only if you don't have resources to cater the mass. If you can cater all, go for it!

4. Conversion Takes Time; keep patience

Any business relation takes time to be established. There are certain phases that goes into it like -- knowing each other, knowing the company, knowing the products/services, understanding and finding the usage in business, getting approval for the purchase etc.

There is no short-cut to bringing revenue. Its a game of patience. If you bug anyone too much, you might lose a potential customer. So just let someone know about your services and let him take time. Till then you can best be patient, and create more leads.

5. More people, more views and comments.

Ideas are best challenged. More people you connect to, diverse is the angle of thinking. This helps to fine-tune products and services. Always keep open mind. Its always better to know and not do something, than not to know at all!

6. Diverse Thoughts, a way to remain interesting

Many people tell, its always good to be focused so that you establish yourself as an expert in that field and people come to you for the same reason. Well, nothing wrong with this line. But there is a limit on how much you can talk on the same subject. There is also a limit on how much your reader reads the same stuffs. There needs to be a balance and you need to talk on diverse topics so that you won't bore your followers.

This solves a greater purpose of catering to various groups. Have friends or followers from various areas and enjoy the talk. Talk about general life, music, news, economy, politics and then business. This gives a more real human feel. If you just target a section of people and talk business, you look more like a BOT. And given time I may build a robot better than you :P (no offence, just a joke).

7. Chances to be seen as Twitter Star

Money attracts money. Remaining small helps in better targeting, but do not forget one thing, till you are small you are the only person who market you or your services. But once you grow, others start marketing you as well. They market for reasons like -- a) to get a bigger benefit as a return favor b) when you are big, you are a star and people love talking about you and want to show his association with you.

8. More People much more second order reach

Large no. of followers always have this advantage. More the people, more the reach. Even by luck if someone Retweets an important Tweet, it can do miracle! So why miss the chance!!

9. High Scores in Graders and Others

This is another important part of the Twittersphere. Rankers and graders have nothing to rank accounts if they don't consider followers count and RTs count. So all of them use it, and to promote their service they promote the elites (based on their scores). If you are there, they promote you. Again an additional gain at no cost!!

10. More Followers equivalent to more Site Visits; Conversion is a additional art

Conversion to business is different from getting in touch and letting people know. Conversion is an art, and you might or might not have that. If you have networking capability, just do it. Seek help from a sales person from your company to convert the lead.

Just focus on getting greater reach, where Social Networking like Twitter best works. They give facility like more traffic to your site.

Once you have someone following you, try to make him your friend and connect in Facebook and LinkedIn. Next step would be to exchange company profiles and projects.

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Now I am done. Now its your turn. Do not forget to comment. Would be looking to get your thoughts. Good Luck!

I hope this doesn’t overlap much with what’s already been said but I’ve been compiling data on the different techniques for the past few weeks and thought I’d share… I put everything up here: http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2009/07/21/how-to-get-twitter-followers-the-definitive-guide/

I’ve been using Twitter for 3 weeks now and spent hours and hours trying to master what I thought was a good twitter strategy (get as many followers as possible via profile keyword search using auto-bots) but I soon discovered that my stream was getting clogged by “Teeth Whitening” pitches and MLM/Affliate crap.

Plus when I auto unfollowed I discovered that the unfollow was reciprocated immediately by those I culled – Aye?

So I reasoned that they were following the same strategy I was. Pursuing what I thought were targeted followers ended up being a spam fest with little value exchanged either way.

Thank goodness I’ve STOPPED.

I’m of two minds:

Either I keep my following and follower ratios really low and build strong reciprocal relationships on a small scale…but do it organically

Or I build I really large following using both and automated (20% say) and an organic approach and set myself apart by providing really good content and using offline techniques to build strong relationships with my followers.

See how here http://bit.ly/2cetY

Nobody and I mean nobody on Twitter is doing this – Do you think if I had 20k followers and I sent out this stuff to my heavy hitters do you think they would look out for my tweets amongst the clutter – Not enough value is being exchanged.